I just sat down and watched this video from IBM’s Chief Scientist Jeff Jonas, and he gives us a lot of food for thought on why you should first master the concepts of accounting before you try to work on systems that attempt to make sense of data. The main thought on data, context and accumulation is that the future should bring us a system “where the data finds the data, and the relevance finds the consumer.” My favorite part comes around 4:30 where Jonas references the way Librarians index information and weaves the information together like a puzzle gets put together.

If your interested in what the future has to hold for moving “big data” into relevant information that leads to smart decisions, then this is a 17-minute video that is well worth your time to watch. Jonas covers the following questions:

  • How important is understanding big data for our future? (0:17)
  • Why are organizations failing to understand this big data? (2:20)
  • Do organizations need to transition to an API-based approach? (4:15)
  • What can companies learn from casinos? (4:50)
  • Will the big data problems encompass the web at large? (6:28)
  • How does the emergence of many edge points influence this equation? (8:19)
  • What needs to happen on the back end to enable these changes? (10:08)
  • What kind of infrastructure is required? (11:08)
  • How does the social web impact big data? (12:24)
  • Can Google evolve to keep up with big data? (13:13)
  • What is the role of people and crowd-sourcing in big data (14:52)
  • What are the challenges of the future? (16:41)